Saturday, April 13, 2013

How Comics?

If that doesn't sound like proper English, that may be true, but there is a point to why I wrote it that way. For the next few days, I am going to dive into How I got into comics and Why I continue to write comics. So the first question is How did I get into comics?

First off, I probably got into comics for way different reasons than 99.9% of comic book creators. It wasn't to get rich (ha, rich, that's a comic book creator joke there), but it wasn't because I loved reading comics either.

In 2009, while I was writing a screenplay called Singles! (which still isn't finished at the time I'm writing this article). I was about halfway finished, and fully plotted out with the romantic comedy/drama story and I wanted to look at what I could do next. I seen that comic book movies were starting to get popular, and I thought that I could maybe write a character that wouldn't normally be made into a movie. When I was thinking about doing this, I have not actually read a comic book in over 10 years. I grew up reading comics like X-Men and other Marvel comics when I was younger, and I had always loved the character Superman, but I just grew out of that and went on to other things. But I picked up some comics of a DC character named Steel, who I knew about already, but that was the character I wanted to write about. I wanted to avenge the horrible Shaq movie made in the 90's and bring a different twist to the character and story line. To this day, one of my prized possessions is a signed copy of Steel #1 by all of the creators involved. Anyways, I started plotting out the story then I realized that DC was never going to remake a Steel movie.

Even though that was a failed experiment, it proved pivotal to my journey as a writer. About a week later, I started to kick around the idea of writing a comic, after seeing some really cool and unique comics that had just come out (Chew being a big one), I told myself if I could develop a unique, non superhero story, then I would try and become a comic book writer. Long story short, I drove to work and plotted out my series Parallel Dilemma while listening to Breaking Benjamin songs.

Now that I had a story, I had no idea on how to get an artist. Luckily, I somehow stumbled on the idea to search on Craigslist for an artist. Though that collaboration that I made on Craigslist didn't work, I did provide me with meaningful information on where to search and market comic book creators online, it taught me how to write comics better for artist, and it showed me how many people are needed to actually pitch comics.

Shortly after becoming a comic book author, I signed a contract with Arcana for the Last Ninja with an artist I met on Digital Webbing (one of the places I learned from collaboration #1) and I think I became hooked for life on comics.